Mystery Writer More Elemental Than Elementary
by Ron McNicoll
Book discussion groups have become as numerous as California poppies on the green hillsides in spring. A mystery book group that meets monthly at Goodenough Books in Livermore stands out in the crowd.
Its facilitator, Camille Minchino, heads the most prominent panel of critics in mystery writing. She has written five mystery novels.
Minichino knows many Bay Area mystery writers personally, because she is a member of the Bay Area chapter of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). She is chairwoman of the MWA panel that makes the most prestigious awards in mystery writing, the Edgars. The award is named after Edgar Allen Poe, considered the pioneer of the American mystery novel. The committee is reading this year's published mysteries and will present the awards for best novels in 2002.
It's fitting that author Minichino has lived a storied life. She earned degrees in math and physics about 40 years ago, when few women considered science careers. For several years, she was in a Catholic convent. As she jokingly said in a Ms. magazine article in 1996, even “changed genders” by becoming Sister Anthony.
Currently, Minichino is doing some contract writing work for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), including a history of the Lab. Minichino first came to LLNL in the 1970s on a sabbatical from a teaching job in New England.
She moved to the Bay Area from her native Massachusetts a few years later, and worked for the nuclear safety engineering department at LLNL. She also worked in the Lab’s science education area, where she developed a program for K-12 science teachers in Livermore and other school districts in the Bay Area.
“We taught teachers in summer, and gave them Lab experience. Unfortunately that program went away,” she said.
Now Minichino’s mystery novels are the area where she uses her science education. “I wanted to cast science in the friendly light I’ve always seen it. My main character is a retired physicist. She’s funny and human, someone you would like. You associate science with this lovable person,” she said.
Minichino decided on an orderly approach to writing her novels. She started with the first element on the periodic table of elements, hydrogen. She plans to work forward all the way to number 109.
She said that might confer a kind of immortality on her, if she can get all the way to the last element. Or she might have to bring out a book titled “The Carbon Through Uranium Murders,” she said.
How do you tie an element in physics to a murder? Minichino makes it seem elementary, if not elemental. In “The Helium Murder,” the book’s heroine, retired physicist Gloria Lamerino, advises the police on who might profit from a murder that centers on a congressional vote about whether the U.S. should sell some of its helium reserves in Texas.
In “The Lithium Murder,” waste is not being handled properly. A janitor learns that, and he is murdered. The setting is related to science, though it’s not necessarily the motive for murder. Lamerino reasons out the solution.
All but one of the crime novels are set in Minichino’s hometown, Revere, Mass, a suburb of 43,000 about five miles from Boston. Like Minichino, the fictional heroine is Italian-American, was a physicist, and retired from a California lab, though in the novels it was the fictional Berkeley University Lab (BUL).
Tilden Park in Berkeley serves as a setting for a scene in one of the books. “I chose Berkeley because if you are living in the middle of the country, you’ve heard about Berkeley, not about Livermore. Berkeley is more colorful than Livermore,” she said.
The fictional character’s residence, an apartment above a funeral home in Revere, doesn’t resemble Minichino’s San Leandro home. Instead of the boyfriend who is a police officer, a plot device to feed both love interest and the heroine’s access to the crime problem, Minichino is married to Dick Rufer, whom she met at LLNL in the 1970s.
Minichino manages a busy schedule. Besides her crime novel writing and work for the MWA, she also heads a chapter of the California Writers Club, takes a screen-writing class, teaches a class in science, technology and cultural change at Golden Gate University, and is trying to adapt her published books for a television series.
The discussion group at Goodenough Books, though, practically runs itself, she said. Each of the seven or eight people who show up get to select a book for discussion. Minichino’s own tastes run toward the dark side of mysteries, though the books she has written are upbeat. “I write cozy. I read dark,” she said.
The Independent, JULY 26, 2001